Imagine standing on a mountain in Mexico, the early morning sun beaming down on its auburn peak. As you take in the dazzling beauty of nature, your eyes settle on a tree ablaze with one of the most dramatic colors of autumn – fiery orange.
Now picture the leaves exploding into the air and taking flight across the mountaintop. Suddenly, you remember it’s spring, not fall, and you’re not looking at leaves caught up in a gust of wind, but millions of Monarch butterflies beginning the final stretch of a remarkable journey.
This breathtaking moment of live film is the reward awaiting those who venture to the IMAX 3D Movie Theater in downtown Chattanooga to see “Flight of the Butterflies,” a new 45-minute film that tells the story of one man’s quest to track the migratory patterns of the Monarch.
“Flight of the Butterflies” works well on three levels. The first is as a documentary about the Monarch, which annually travels from Canada to Mexico and then back again. It takes three generations of butterflies to make the journey south, and the filmmakers captured every challenge, danger and awe-inspiring moment along the way.
Most impressive are the jaw-dropping close-ups of a Monarch laying its eggs, the eggs hatching, the larvae growing and then transforming into an adult (no sci-fi thriller can match the excitement of watching a 52-foot caterpillar crawl across a movie screen in 3D), and the butterfly breaking out of its shell and unfolding its wings.
While most of “Flight of the Butterflies” consists of live footage, CGI is used to good effect to show the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. As I watched the larvae form a hard shell and then grow new eyes, organs and wings, I marveled at the incredible wonder of nature. Close-ups of the millions of scales that make up a butterfly’s wings also stand out in my memory, rendered as they were in great detail on the six-story screen.
“Flight of the Butterflies” also works as a showcase for IMAX 3D, which has a grandeur the so-called IMAX and Big D movie screens in multiplexes cannot match. The first shot of the movie is of the inside of a forest, a small bush in the foreground, then a rock and then trees stretching back from there. The image is so deep, it pulls you into the screen, but it’s nothing compared to what follows.
Moments later, the stadium-style theater appeared to be filled with thousands of Monarchs set against a clear blue sky. Although I resisted the urge to reach out and catch one, the people sitting next to me didn’t. They came up empty-handed, but they got an eyeful.
During one scene, a butterfly appeared to fly across the theater to land on my shoe as I sat cross-legged. The 3D is that convincing. I love watching movies shot in 3D, but as good as “Avatar” was, it can’t hold a candle to “Flight of the Butterflies.” The giant IMAX glasses made viewing the film more comfortable, too.
Finally, “Flight of the Butterflies” tells the true story of Dr. Fred Urguhart, who spent his life uncovering the mysteries of where the Monarchs traveled. He became fascinated with the butterflies as a child, and as an adult, devoted decades to tagging untold numbers of insects and mobilizing thousands of “citizen scientists” across the country to look for them. He was nearly an old man before one of his volunteers found the small sanctuary in Mexico to which the butterflies travel.
In a powerful moment originally captured by a National Geographic photographer but re-created in “Flight of the Butterflies” using traditional cinematic storytelling, Dr. Urguhart finds one of his tagged insects among the millions on those few Mexican mountains. As the camera pulls backs, and all we see are butterflies filling the space around him, and all we hear are the beating of their frail wings, he narrates, “For one brief, fleeting moment, time stood still.”
What a beautiful story about the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition.
Maybe you’ve grown indifferent to the IMAX offerings in Chattanooga, living as you do in the city. But “Flight of the Butterflies” is no mere tourist attraction. Rather, it’s a deeply moving film about a true miracle. Somehow, within a thin layer of atmosphere on a tiny blue dot in the middle of a vast cosmos, millions of windswept scraps of life fly south for countless miles, compelled by an unseen hand to undertake an unimaginable feat of endurance to land on a mountaintop in Mexico.
“Flight of the Butterflies” showed me things I’d never imagined, and left me awestruck and with a deeper appreciation for both the simplicity and complexity of this world, which is at least as fragile as a butterfly’s wings.
Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.